I've been an entrepreneur for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I started selling cool rocks even before I sold lemonade. At age 8, I hired my two friends to deliver newspapers and gave them 75 cents a day, and I kept 25 cents. I've gone on to start much larger companies, divisions within companies, both within the US and outside, that have led to both success and failure. Venture backed, partnerships, bootstrapped, high growth, retail, commercial real estate, technology, energy, B2B, B2C, B20 - nobody is there to buy) and more. I’ve learned my greatest life and business lessons from my failures. I recently completed a book for Wiley & Sons, entitled The 7 Non Negotiables of Winning: Tying Soft Traits to Hard Results, which you can read about here: http://www.7nns.com. My current company, Fishbowl, is a culmination of everything I’ve learned over my 30-plus business years.

5 Important Things The Mayans Got Right

A great deal of attention has been focused this year on what is wrong or could go wrong in the world today. This year has provided a steady stream of “fiscal mudslides and mudslinging”, end of the world theories, stock market ups and downs.

We could all use a breather! Now is a good time to lighten up and focus on all that is actually going well in the world. In this spirit, we respectfully offer the “doomsday thinkers” a vacation day so that we can conduct our own “archaeological dig” to discover what the Mayans got right and how we can honor the rich legacy they left us. At our own company, Fishbowl, we do our best to be forward-thinking scouts and respectful historians for those who came before us and those who will hopefully benefit in the future.

With respect to our fellow Mayan technologists, we understand the pressure to meet release dates. One projected release date we all hope the Mayans have missed is the doomsday prediction of 12-21-12. As software developers we do our best to meet our projected release dates, but when we do not, we don’t believe the world is coming to an end. We keep an open mind, we work together and we try to stay focused on achieving greatness for our customers and for our company.

As technologists, there are clearly some important things the Mayans got right

But in the spirit of software development, our team has hypothesized this week about the things the Mayans got right, and how those things could help us and others to build our own legacies as well:

1. Built to Last – Architectural Geniuses

The Mayans were one of the most advanced civilizations in the Americas. They mastered many technologies from astronomy to agriculture but one of their most memorable achievements is their towering pyramid temples. It is obvious that when the Mayans took on the task of temple building, they intended their structures to last forever. Chichen Itza and Palenque are great examples that we can see and experience today. One of our own goals is to build a 100-year company. By keeping this goal at the forefront of our planning, we are continually recommitting to create structures and strategies that will survive the test of time. We realize that technology companies come and go. Many are constructed from the beginning with an eye on acquisition or the ever-so-coveted IPO. My business partner, Mary Scott, and I are committed to the concept of “no exit.” We approach every plan and decision from the perspective that we are in it for the long haul. This means that “flash-bang” ideas must take a back seat to long-term customer relationships, vendor partnerships and enduring products.

2. The Mayans Knew When to Upgrade

We don’t believe the world ends on 12.21.12. We believe the significance of the date is that it was when the Mayans discovered a new way of tracking time. It’s possible that the Mayans most likely simply “upgraded” to a new calendaring system and cutting edge technology that was available for their time. These great warriors had the high courage to embrace new ways of thinking, creativity, and new tools. In a similar vein, our company uses agile methodologies across the board in all departments. When something doesn’t work we don’t spend a lot of time explaining or justifying it, we simply move on, reset, recalculate and build again.

3. Technological Mastery

Mayans were master technologists for their time. Along with technologies like mathematics, architecture and astronomy, the Mayans had perfected one of the most important technologies known to humanity–agriculture. Agriculture may not seem like technology, but to the Mayans, agriculture was their technology. The ability to produce a surplus of food frees up time for many people. Instead of spending 14 hours a day eking out a living hunting and gathering, the cultivation of corn gave the Mayans more free time. They spent that time dreaming up ways of building huge pyramids and playing ballgames and mapping stars. Similarly, we and other software developers focus our time on creating technologies to make people’s lives easier. By making their lives easier, we create more time for them to spend in thinking of the ways to make their own businesses better and hopefully to create their own strategies for withstanding the test of enduring for time.

4. Life Goes On

We believe the Mayans didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the end of time and neither do we. Even if the world were going to end, we would remain focused on our original goals of helping people to manage their inventory better. We plan to do what we think is right no matter what challenges show up tomorrow. We have experienced a few major setbacks in our day. In one of our early years, for example, we inadvertently released what we now refer to as “The Armageddon bug”. The nature of the bug was so severe we were sure at the time it would put our company out of business. The Armageddon bug didn’t put us out of business but it was an important time of growth and learning for us. That experience allowed us to take crisis in stride, and to be quick to analyze and learn and to make course corrections. Our hope is to prepare more accurately for success rather than failure, but when we do fail, to “fail up.”

5. Enjoy Your Time on this Earth and Leave Good Memories for Future Generations

Often in Mayan cities you see one ubiquitous piece of culture- a ball court. I’m sure archeologists have countless interpretations for these ball courts, but to me it seems obvious that the Mayans liked to have fun. Likewise, we believe strongly in a culture of fun.

Fishbowl developers celebrate the news that their newest product has just met certification

We trust employees to manage their own work and fun.

A fellow CEO who at one time shared our building complained that all we did was laugh, goof off and make noise. We didn’t know what to say except to invite him to a game of ping pong. I’m not sure where he is or what his company is doing today, but we are still here, thriving in a great old building that has also housed Novell and WordPerfect, which is a story for another day. Creativity and success flow from happy people. We believe the Mayans knew it—and while we hope very much their calender predictions were a software error, we are hopeful that their strategies for living, like our own, will stand up to the test of time. We hope to continue to do so for a very long time—and hopefully forever.

Additional reporting for this article was provided by Mary Michelle Scott, President of Fishbowl. Additional resources are available at www.7nns.com.

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Another interesting fact about Mayan children is that most were named according to the day they were born. Every day of the year had a specific name for both boys and girls and parents were expected to follow that practice.

David and Mary, Kevin and Marilyn, I love your thinking. The Mayan’s did some remarkable things and we have much to learn from them. Certainly the fact that they had a calendar that saw into the future hundreds of years past their own time is evidence of how forward thinking they were–and we should be!

This article reminded me of another I read a while ago regarding why great empires or organization come and then go. Organizations grow when they have an aura of “attraction” – elements that draw people. Organizations decline when they have an aura of “control” – when they stubbornly try to cling to the archaic elements that once made them great (back when they were attracting greatness to them). The differences and the moment of change can be subtle and 99% of the time it seems the switch was flipped by someone at the top. I’ve seen this apply to a family, a team, a department, a company, a whole industry, nations – to any group of any size.

Being a “people first” company like Fishbowl is a great foundation for “attracting” (talent, partners, customers, etc.)

I love the concept in #4 – life goes on. The concept that no matter what happens, life will go on is a great concept to hold on to. Businesses or even individuals that adopt this concept generally have higher levels of success because they don’t see things as world ending events. They continue to work their plans and take setbacks as just expected bumps in the road. A powerful concept at any time in world history.

Refreshing perspective on all that is right with the world of work as seen through the lens of the Mayan civilization. Thanks for offering an alternative voice to the steady drumbeat of dire news and predictions.